Once again, NASA’s Perseverance Rover makes a startling discovery on Mars 

If you are a budding astronomer keeping a close tab on space related news, you would definitely be acquainted with NASA’s Mars Exploration Programme that has been in place since 2020. It includes the Perseverance Rover that hovers around the red planet while exploring it in detail. This rover has already made some outstanding discoveries, and recently it has added another one to the list.  

Okay, so what is the latest finding? Multiple samples of never-seen-before organic materials traced in an area where there was an old river delta (formed out of silt and salt accumulation) once upon a time. What’s interesting is that, this fan-shaped delta was formed more than 3.5 billion years ago at the confluence of a Martian lake and a river, more specifically near the 45 kilometre wide Jezero crater where the NASA rover had first touched down in February 2021.  

So, how did the Perseverance Rover come upon the organic materials? Well, it did so while looking for evidence of early life on Mars. This brand-new discovery comes right when the US Space Agency is preparing for an upcoming mission that will bring the first fragments of Mars back to the Earth, by simply retrieving the samples acquired by the rover so far. 

Sources cite that the rocks that the astronomers have been studying near the Martian delta for so long did not have such high concentration of organic content as the ones recently detected, which is why this latest discovery is both special and significant to understand Mars better. 

However, what makes this discovery scientifically important is the fact that organic substances are usually found in rocks that are only deposited in a habitable environment (such as a lake in this case). This in turn is fascinating as organic carbon-forming molecules constitute the very basis of life, thus proving that there once living organisms existent on the red planet at some point of time.  

So far, the Mars rover has collected 12 samples of organic material, out of which 4 are from inside the delta site itself. Next, the rover is trying to analyse the sedimentary rocks (especially the one near the Skinner Ridge and Wildcat Ridge) of the delta region. The goal is to examine them closely and determine whether they too were formed when the region was previously underwater and carried various particles in different shapes and sizes, that in turn had settled down into the lake’s bed; just like it happens on Earth.  

What you may not have known is that this Jezero crater floor was formerly studied during the Perseverance Rover’s first ever science campaign and had found samples of igneous rocks, which were rooted deep inside the magma. They were the proof of volcanic activity on the Martian surface.